Dreams and Nightmares in Architecture

Architecture has never been more challenged than it is today. Addressing the sheer scale of the triple challenges of environmental sustainability, in the form of climate change; the social, in the form of class, gender, and racial inequality; and the cultural, in terms of identity, exclusion, and prejudice, in particular against First Nations Peoples, is a seemingly overwhelming task for architecture. At the same time, these great challenges come at a moment when architecture has never been so marginalised and diminished. The practice of architecture has been progressively desiccated, undermined, and commodified through the instrumental processes of the contemporary development industry and professional practice, together with the simplistic reductionism of media technology and market consumption demands. How could this happen? How can the true nature of architecture have been so undermined?